It’s A Jazz Thing contains 41 jazz drum tracks exploring iconic grooves within jazz music. Tempos range from 60 bpm to 360 bpm. It encompasses basic swing patterns on both brushes and sticks at various tempos and covers a wide range of styles from early swing and big band drumming through Bebop, Cool Jazz, Hardbop, Latin Jazz and it’s more contemporary applications.

Close attention to detail was essential in creating each drum track so that they replicate the original recordings as accurately as possible. The drums and cymbals were selected and tuned accordingly whilst the touch and feel are clearly captured.

All drum tracks were played by David Dyson who frequently plays at Ronnie Scotts amongst others. We used two variations of David’s Japanese Sakae Trilogy kit. These kits are lightweight and a perfect kit for classic Jazz tones of the 50’s. The first kit was a 5 piece kit with a larger kick drum and low tuned drums providing a more muffled Big Band sound. The second variation was a typical 4 piece BeBop variation which was tuned higher providing more open resonant tones.

The kits were recorded at Livingston Studio 1 using the brighter live room. The tracks were produced and mixed by Matt Lawrence.

“As many of you will know, a commonly tried-and-trusted mic’ing approach to a Jazz kit is, “less is more”. There is often little need for anything more than three or four mics, either employing the Glyn Johns method, or a mono overhead with a spot mic on the kick to help with low end power and snare mic to help with definition of the delicate grace notes.

With a well balanced and properly tuned drum kit, and a great drummer who plays evenly over the whole kit, the sound should be already balanced there in the room - just capture that!

Amongst the hefty list of mics I used, the 3 mic sound is there and available to all who wish to use the multi-tracks to achieve it. I wanted to give more options and to cover bases; whilst some of these really authentic sounding loops work in isolation, I would like you to have the option of moulding them to fit your song - this might involve a little embellishment or focus when in the mix with other instruments. I also wanted to give a few room mics to give you some crazy options and ambience to go nuts with!

It’s worth also noting that the biggest choice we made first was where to place the kit in the studio, we tried it in a few places and in both of the main rooms at Livingston, recorded (3 mics) in each, then listened back to the results (without knowing which was which) - David and I both had the same first choice so that was an easy decision.”

For the Mixes we provide some tracks with close mic variations and some with no close mics (such as hi-hat and toms) to offer a more traditional jazz sounding kit.

We recorded most of the drum tracks on to a Studer 2” tape machine using a 16- track head-block for a nice analogue phat sound. The drum tracks with brushes were recorded straight to Pro Tools to reduce any tape noise.

The loop packs (coming soon) contain a folder of grooves and fills. We have included as many useful loops that we can get from each drum track. The loops come formatted as 24 bit and 16 bit WAVs, Apple Loops and Rex 2 Files.

Please note, this is the Loop version. Check out the Multi Track version HERE and Stems version HERE

Miles Davis “All Blues” - Jimmy Cobb inspired 6/8 brush groove, later moving to the sticks. Clear stick definition and controlled intensity. The track is featured on the seminal album “Kind of Blue” 1959. (separate ride, hi hat and snare)